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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Back at their room, Dean opened the door and the first thing Sam saw was the outline of a man standing by the window.
Sam had his gun aimed at the center of the man’s torso before Dean got the light on.
“Dad?” Dean said, his voice full of fear and wonder.
The man turned, and even through the beard Sam saw it: the angry shadow of the man in Dean’s pictures, the same lines around his eyes as were starting to form around Dean’s. But John Winchester’s eyes were narrowed with intense suspicion.
Dean dropped his bag and crossed the room in seconds, stopping inches away from his father and hesitating until his father reached up to pull him into a hug. Dean pressed his cheek into John Winchester’s shoulder; Sam could see the muscles in his back working through his shirt as he squeezed.
“It was a trap, Dad, I’m sorry,” Dean said, the words blurred. Sam carefully put his bag down, then rested the gun on top of it.
“It’s all right. I thought it might’ve been. Who’s this?”
Dean pulled away, his hand still lingering on Winchester’s shoulder, and turned his body back towards Sam. “Dad, this is Sam Marshall. He’s a hunter. We’ve been working together for about nine months.”
Sam nodded in greeting, wishing that he still had the gun just to have something to do with his hands. Dean’s use of ‘hunter’ had sent a warm shiver through him.
“We need to talk,” Winchester said. Dean began to look around the room, then stopped. He took a few steps back from his father. The light was too bad to tell, but Sam would have bet just about anything that he’d turned bright red. They hadn’t exactly cleaned up before they left, and Winchester had to have been in here long enough to see, and probably smell, what had been going on.
But that wasn’t where Winchester was going, not exactly: “This is family business, Dean.” He glanced quickly at Sam, then returned his focus to his son. “Private.”
Sam prepared himself to leave and take a calming walk around the block. Dean would tell him later, and so he could afford to let the man get away with ordering his son around like—No, it was a mistake to compare him to Father. John Winchester’s words had no threats curling around them like smoke, only the simple assumption of obedience.
Then Dean opened up a whole new heading under the category of Dean Winchester Is Braver Than You: he closed the distance between them and grabbed Sam’s hand, squeezing hard. “No, sir,” Dean said.
John Winchester gaped at Dean’s hand with roughly the same expression Sam imagined he himself was wearing. Sure, it was relatively obvious that they weren’t exactly living the chaste life of the Odd Couple, but Dean was saying a lot more than that, at least in Winchester-speak.
Dean’s fingers were hot and his palm was sweaty, but his jaw was as set as if he were facing down a pissed-off ghost. The triumphant rush swelling Sam’s chest didn’t dissipate even when he realized that this might complicate their access to whatever John Winchester knew. He met Dean’s father’s eyes, trying not to add any more challenge than necessary, just wanting him to know that Dean was not alone.
At last, Winchester exhaled. His own hands came up, as if he were staring into the barrel of a gun. “All right, then.” His eyes were shining, the way Dean’s always did when he was in deep emotional territory.
“I saw an all-night diner a block over,” Sam offered.
****
The diner reminded Sam of Nighthawks, glaring yellow brightness that didn’t dispel the loneliness of a dark night, but maybe that was just Chicago.
They hadn’t spoken on the way over after Sam had pointed them in the proper direction. John Winchester nodded pleasantly at the waitress who seated them, then waited for her to retreat.
He cleared his throat and addressed Dean. “You’ve told him about the yellow-eyed demon?”
Sam twitched, wanting to say something like, ‘yes, he’s passed on all three sentences you’ve ever said to him about it,’ but Dean’s knee brushed up against his and he only nodded along with Dean.
“I’ve been tracking down leads. I’m close, very close, to finding a weapon that will enable me to kill it. Permanently. Not just exorcise.”
Sam was silenced by the shock, not for the same reasons that Dean was. If that was even close to true, the man would have almost incalculable power. And, more importantly, that weapon was their way out. It could—Sam could—save Dean.
He wanted to demand to hear all about it, but he bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, and sure enough Dean did the right thing: “What is it, Dad? The weapon.” Dean sounded cracked open with hope, like some worn-down rock that turned out to be full of crystals inside.
Winchester shook his head. “I can’t tell you. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dad—”
“No, son.”
Dean bowed his head. “Yessir,” he mumbled, then said something unintelligible and stood, which meant that Sam had to get out of the booth. Dean stumbled off towards the bathroom sign in the back of the diner, and they both watched him go.
Sam took a couple of deep breaths. He could whammy Winchester now; he was unlikely to get a better opportunity. But there was still the problem of finesse, and not only could Sam not risk a failure to extract all the relevant details, Dean was likely to get a little upset if his father turned into a zombie while he was pulling himself together in the bathroom.
Instead, he sat down and stared across the table.
“So,” John Winchester said, and the expression in his eyes had nothing to do with hunting demons and everything to do with a parent sizing up a suitor, which was so farcical that it almost made Sam’s stomach turn. “How long have you and Dean been together?” His tone was weirdly polite, and Dean had already reported on when they’d met, so he was clearly asking the more intimate question.
Sam shrugged, then schooled his expression into something more placating. “It was gradual,” he said. With nothing obvious to say, he shut his mouth. Let Winchester figure out how to keep the conversation from dying, if he cared about the guy his son was fucking.
“Dean isn’t very experienced,” Winchester began. It was so very tempting to correct him on that, but instead Sam merely curled his hands into fists under the table, using the pain of his nails cutting into his palms to ground himself. “I don’t—it’s not that you’re a—he’s always thrown himself into things. It makes him—easy to hurt.”
Dean clearly had gotten more than bone structure from his father. That incoherent little speech sounded like it had grated like a rasp on the way out. Well, good. “With all due respect, we both know who’s hurt Dean more.”
Winchester rocked back an inch or so. Sam realized that Winchester’s hands were also concealed under the table. He wondered whether there were two guns aimed at his crotch right now, or only one.
“I don’t know what Dean’s told you—” Winchester’s face was stiff underneath his beard, his eyes narrowed.
Sam shook his head. “About you? Not a damned word. Your son grew up strong and loyal and I guess that’s some sort of testimony about you. But you broke him apart like you were splitting logs when you left him. I’m looking out for Dean now.”
Sam couldn’t interpret all the shades of anger and grief running over Winchester’s face, settling down at last into a dull burn. “Fair enough,” Winchester said in an impressively even tone. “You planning on getting in the way of hunting down this demon? Might be dangerous.”
Was the implication supposed to be that Sam was selfishly interested in Dean’s safety, or just that Sam was a coward? Didn’t matter. “It’s not the killing that worries me. Sir.”
He sensed Dean coming within earshot then, and it was fortunate that Winchester spotted Dean at the same time and shut up.
The resumed meal was just about as uncomfortable as Sam could have imagined. After Dean started turning his head between the two of them every five seconds, looking like someone just nailed a kitten to his steering wheel, Sam sucked it up and did his best to emanate goodwill. Winchester eventually managed to do the same—Sam could tell that he was an excellent con man—and by the end Dean was happy enough to order an ice cream sundae. Observing Dean in dessert heaven was a temptation no man could have resisted, so Sam let his lips curl up just a little, knowing that Winchester was watching and drawing the appropriate conclusions. But hell, half the diner was staring at Dean.
****
Winchester abandoned Dean in order to protect him. Dean professed to understand and even agree. He nodded and sirred and stared out at nothing with wet eyes after Winchester had gone.
Sam understood why Dean might want to think that inflicting pain was a sign of paternal love. Hell, he’d felt the same way when Father had explained, all those times, about the true meaning of all his punishments.
Difference was, Sam had grown to see the relish in Father’s eyes.
No, Winchester didn’t seem to be enjoying his solo quest. But he still made Sam want to scream: So, fear for Dean makes you weak, and your genius solution to that is to keep yourself ignorant about all the danger he’s in? Some accident of fate gave you Dean, Dean, and all you can think about is people twenty years dead?
If Sam could have explained that Dean was already a specific target, maybe his father wouldn’t have fled. But if the man had been rational, then Sam wouldn’t have needed to regret his inability to explain, so it wasn’t Sam’s fault. Anyway, Sam wanted him gone; Dean had gotten over his abandonment before, and could again.
If Winchester did manage to get his hands on a weapon that could kill Father, he’d be very useful. And then, perhaps, his utility would end.
****
“I gotta say, I’m impressed by your initiative,” Dean said from the driver’s seat. “Hell Hound’s Lair dot com?”
Sam shifted restlessly in his seat. “What can I say, I feel like killing something.”
Dean chewed his lower lip between his teeth. Sam guessed that he’d just been a tad too honest. Their encounters with Arba and John Winchester had left him bloodthirsty, yes, and the local legend seemed intriguing enough. He wanted the simple satisfaction of getting rid of a spirit that preyed on innocents.
Which was probably why the Hell House turned out to be the fault of other innocents, children playing with spirit sigils they didn’t understand. Creating a tulpa out of the power of online belief. Not that Sam thought that Father would rule over a well-organized world of sunshine and puppies—not unless the puppies were staked out to die of thirst in the desert, anyway—but Jesus, people were stupid.
The tulpa nearly decapitated Dean with its newly-imagined ax before Sam was able to draw its attention. For reasons possibly known only to Tibetan mystics, the TK worked on the ax, but not on the tulpa itself, so Sam found himself up against the wall getting choked while Dean improvised with lighter fluid.
At least the tulpa didn’t have any better idea of its own vulnerabilities than they did. When Dean yelled and waved his makeshift flamethrower at it, it let Sam go long enough that they escaped before the flames engulfed the house.
“What do we do if the legend changes?” Sam wondered as they watched a section of the roof collapse.
“Come back, I guess.” Dean caught Sam’s dissatisfied expression. “Makes you think, how many of the things we hunt only exist because people believe in them?”
“People should believe in something else,” Sam muttered.
Dean slung his arm across Sam’s shoulders. “Ah, that’s just, you know, human nature. Thinkin’ there’s still mysteries in the world, or proof of life after death—a lot of people need that.”
The top story of the house fell in with a crump audible over the crackle of the flames. “I don’t get why that makes anybody feel better,” Sam admitted. “As far as I’ve seen, the afterlife sucks. Tormented ghosts and demons from Hell. Wouldn’t it be better, safer, if it all just ended? If you could just be done when it’s your time. People delude themselves, thinking they’ll be the lucky ones, the saved.”
Dean’s thumb stroked against his neck. “At least we know how to bring them some peace,” he offered. “When I go, I want to be salted and burned. You’re right--you go out, you should get a real end.”
Sam turned his head. The fire reflected in Dean’s eyes, brightening the green of his pupils to tiger-fierceness. “Not any time soon.” He turned so that he could cup Dean’s cheek in his hand, brushing his thumb across Dean’s lower lip. Dean’s mouth opened slightly under his touch.
“You know—” Dean began, lame protest, before Sam pulled him close and then pulled him down, right there in the grass, the heat from the fire warming them as the house groaned and spat and burned.
They had to run for the car, holding their jeans up one-handed, when the fire engines finally arrived.
The legend of Mordechai Murdoch disappeared from the internet. There were girls in Richardson, Texas who’d live through their would-be suitors’ attempts to scare them. Sam would never know them, or want to, and they’d never know him. But he’d saved them anyway.
****
“Coordinates, again?” Sam could practically taste his own venom that time.
Dean pounded the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “If you’re coming, don’t bitch about it, all right?”
“Of course I’m coming to…” he found the correct square on the map, “Fitchburg, Wisconsin. I just--”
“Did you ever think maybe he’s my father, and I get to decide whether he’s treatin’ me wrong?”
“No,” he said, which surprised a laugh out of Dean. The billboard that whipped by promised free wireless at the next exit. “Hey, let’s grab lunch, see what we can find out about this hunt, about which I am not bitching.”
Dean kept his slight smile, and Sam didn’t say anything to get rid of it, even when he threw his hands up in frustration at the total lack of reported trouble in Fitchburg.
When they actually arrived, it took several hours to see the problem: late afternoon, and the streets were empty of kids. Sam sweet-talked the woman overseeing her daughter on the swings, all alone, and found out that there had been a recent wave of sickness among the town children. Only five or six were in the hospital, but parents were worried, keeping the healthy ones isolated.
Dean didn’t have CDC badges for them, but Sam had learned enough now to know that nobody actually read what was written on the badges. At least now his Homeland Security ID had an actual picture of him. He talked their way past the duty nurse and interviewed the doctor in charge, Hydecker, while Dean went through the charts looking for anything suggestive of the supernatural.
The children’s immune systems had simply collapsed, one family at a time.
****
Sam used TK to get into the Tarnower house, showing off for Dean. “I coulda done that in ten seconds,” Dean grumped, but Sam could tell that he saw the potential.
On the outside of Bethany Tarnower’s window ledge, Sam found an elongated black handprint, like a shadow frozen in place. When he leaned closer, he smelled rot, and he thought that he saw a cluster of fly eggs at one of the junctions between the fingers. “I’m ruling out pneumonia,” he said. “What the hell leaves a handprint like that?”
Dean pushed past him, inspecting the ledge. “It’s a shtriga,” he said, as if his voice was coming from somewhere very far away. “He wants me to finish the job.”
“What the hell is a shtriga?” He’d thought Dean had been careful to tell him about everything huntable.
“It’s kind of like a witch. I think.” Now Dean sounded even worse, like he’d been gut-shot. His tentativeness was another red flag. Sam knew that he’d sort of promised not to complain about John Winchester’s decision to send them here, but really: this was getting fucked up fast.
“I’ve never heard of a shtriga,” he prompted. “It wasn’t in the journal.”
“We—he hunted one before, in Fort Douglas. I was, uh, maybe ten. It got away.”
Thus, ‘finish the job.’ Except that according to Dean, nothing evil that John Winchester found ever walked away from him. Now Sam seriously regretted snarking earlier, because Dean would—not unfairly—interpret almost anything he asked as an attack on Dean’s father. He settled on a gentle tone and a vague prompt. “What else do you remember?”
“Nothin’,” Dean said immediately. “I was a kid.”
A kid who’d been bullseying targets for years. A kid who’d dropped his first match into an open coffin at age eight, and at ten was already learning how to drive.
Sweet mother of fuck. The only thing for it was to work the job, as fast as possible, and do as much of the work as possible by himself.
“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.
****
The surly preadolescent working the counter at the motel quailed under Sam’s black look and gave them the key to the closest room. Once they were there, Dean busied himself with weapons maintenance, but he didn’t do it in his usual orderly fashion, instead pulling a chair up to the bed and laying all the guns out across the mattress, drifting from one piece to another as if he kept forgetting which one he wanted.
Sam hit the databases. The usual sources were nearly barren, but one reference took him deep into Eastern European folklore repositories. A shtriga, it developed, was an evil entity that fed off of life force, preferably youthful life force. He got to the end of the article he’d found and stared at the screen. “Dean,” he said. “It says here shtrigas are invulnerable to ‘all weapons devised by God and man.’”
Dean’s head snapped up. “That’s not right,” he said. Sam swallowed down his instinctive desire to demand more. After a moment, Dean put his pistol down on the bedspread. “She’s vulnerable when she feeds. Catch her when she’s eating, you can blast her with consecrated iron. I think.”
‘Do you know how strange you’re acting?’ was what he wanted to ask. “How do you know that?” was what he did ask.
Dean picked at a thread that had come loose on the bedspread. “Dad told me.”
****
After that, their room seemed to have no air. They both slept badly, slamming into each other every time one of them shifted or turned.
In the morning, they were on their way to breakfast when they saw the motel kid again, all his attitude lost in dejection as he sat outside the motel office. Dean, of course, stopped to talk to him and found out that his little brother (whom Sam had never seen, but Dean apparently had) was the newest kid to be hospitalized for pneumonia.
“It’s my fault,” the older brother—Michael—said miserably.
“How?” Dean asked.
Michael raised his head, caught perhaps by the fact that Dean didn’t immediately dismiss his confession as the self-centeredness of a child. “I should’ve made sure the window was latched.”
Dean leaned closer, bracing his hands on his knees; he would’ve gotten on his knees, Sam was sure, if the kid had been a couple of years younger. “Listen, I can promise you this is not your fault. Okay?”
“It’s my job to look out for him,” Michael said, like his guts were hanging out. Dean nodded like he understood.
Michael’s mother came out then, and Dean managed to talk his way into giving her a ride to the hospital. She insisted they take her car, and Dean didn’t even balk at driving an automatic; he was deep in the need to hunt. Before he left, he grabbed Sam and leaned in close. “I want this thing dead.” Sam couldn’t say a word.
****
Sam drove the relatively short distance to the library at U Wisconsin-Madison. It didn’t take him long to find the record of deaths in Fort Douglas. Before that, there were other towns, roughly every fifteen to twenty years. The damage had only started to be glimpsed in Fitchburg. In the past, dozens of children had died, slowly, before the shtriga was finished.
Dean called in the afternoon, when his stomach was protesting that lunchtime was already hours past. He gave Dean a quick rundown.
“How far back does this thing go?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “I’ve tracked it back to Black River Falls, back in the 1890s. Real horror show.” He scrolled the microfilm, trying to find the date of the first reports, and stopped at a faded picture of doctors crowded around a patient’s bed. “Fuck me,” he said.
“Sam!”
“I got a photo here of Hydecker attending a sick kid.”
“Yeah?”
“From 1893.”
“Son of a—” Dean cut himself off, drawing an enraged breath.
“You still at the hospital?”
“Lookin’ at him,” Dean said, every word black with fury.
“Don’t do anything,” Sam said, knowing that if he needed to say it then a warning was useless. “I’ll be right there.”
****
Dean didn’t attack Hydecker at the hospital, though. He just brought Michael’s mother back to the motel, and was sitting in their room when Sam returned.
Sam went to him, pulling him up for better inspection, and checked to see that he wasn’t injured, even though that was stupid; Dean would have been arrested if he’d tried anything at the hospital. “You didn’t—”
Dean was too mad at the shtriga to react much to Sam’s manhandling. “I’m not gonna shoot up a pediatrics ward. And I wasn’t armed, so I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to. Anyway, wouldn’t’ve done any good—that bastard’s bulletproof until it opens its goddamned mouth to eat.”
“Okay, what now?”
Dean pulled away, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “The shtriga works through siblings. Means Michael’s next. We gotta talk to him, get his help.”
“You want to use a kid as bait?” It was a good idea, it just wasn’t a Dean idea.
“We’ve got to catch it somehow, or more kids are gonna die.” A muscle jumped in Dean’s jaw. “We let this thing go, it’s gonna keep killing. Now and every time it gets hungry. Over a hundred years already.” It had the sound of a rehearsed justification.
“Are you sure?” Sam would have sworn that Dean would do just about anything to think up an alternative—curl up under the covers of the kid’s bed and impersonate him, at least. As he thought about it, that plan was obviously insufficient: a creature like the shtriga could sense life force and that wouldn’t work.
“Dad sent me here to fix my mistake.”
Oh, this day just kept improving. “What are you talking about?” Sam demanded.
Dean turned his back to Sam, his arms pulled in tight to his sides. “I’m the one whose fault it is. All those kids, they’re hurt ‘cause of me.”
“What? Dean. Dean! You’ve been messed up since we got here. Talk to me,” he begged, closing the distance between them and sliding his hand down Dean’s back. Dean twitched and Sam backed off a few inches.
“He needed me for the hunt,” Dean said at last, his voice back to a kid’s wavering tones. The words spilled from him like water, fast and colorless. “He needed me to draw it out. I was supposed to wait until it started feeding. I swore to him I was strong enough. But I just—I got scared. I couldn’t let it--I called him too soon and when he fired, it—it ran, and I was cryin’, so he went to me instead of following it. He took me out of Fort Douglas, to a friend’s house. By the time he got back, the shtriga disappeared. Just gone. Gone until now.
“He never talked about it. But I let him down and he knew it. He told me what I had to do and I fucked it up. And now those kids are gonna die, unless Michael steps up to do what I couldn’t.”
“Dean,” Sam began.
“Don’t.”
****
But just because Dean’s mind was made up didn’t do squat to convince Michael.
When they went to find Michael in the motel office, he was, to put it mildly, unwilling to listen.
Dean’s insistence that pneumonia was not the culprit in Asher’s coma freaked Michael out from word one; anybody could have heard that Dean was about ready to break down.
Quickly enough, Michael stood and backed to the door, ready to flee. “You’re crazy! Just go away, or I’m calling the cops.”
“I had a brother,” Dean said, his voice harsh and deformed under the pressure, and Michael froze with one hand out towards the counter phone. “I would’ve done anything, anything to keep him safe. But I failed.” Dean sucked in air, ragged. Michael swayed fractionally towards him, drawn as anyone would be to Dean’s total vulnerability, his commitment. “Listen to me, Michael. This thing came through your window, and it attacked your brother. I’ve seen it. I know what it looks like.”
Michael closed his eyes. “It…it has this long, black robe?
“You saw it, didn’t you?” Dean asked, his voice gentling like a storm’s sudden ending.
“I thought it was a nightmare.”
Dean breathed out through his nose. “I wish—I wish to hell I didn’t have to tell you this. But sometimes, nightmares are real.”
“Why are you telling me?” Michael was visibly a kid now. Wanting someone else to take care of the problem—his mom, still at the hospital; maybe his missing father. Sam felt a strange urge to reach out and give him a hug.
That wasn’t what they had to give him. “We need your help,” Dean admitted.
And then it fell apart. Michael was having none of it, still terrified of what he’d seen. He didn’t listen when Dean tried to use his anger over his brother’s illness, then warned him that other kids were still in danger.
Sam had to pull him away when he saw that Dean was about fifteen seconds from taking out his own guilt on the kid. Sam had nothing against emotional blackmail in theory, but it was plain that neither Dean nor Michael would benefit from further conversation.
****
“Well, that sucked,” Dean said when Sam had hustled him back to their room.
“You can’t expect a kid to just do something like that,” Sam told him, not meaning Michael.
Dean ignored him. “Now what?”
“Maybe we can figure out some way to fake a tasty life force,” Sam said, without much conviction. They didn’t even know what the shtriga sensed, not well enough to simulate it.
Someone rapped on the door. Sam’s shoulders sagged involuntarily; it was probably Michael’s mother, come to tell them to get the hell away from her remaining kid.
He was shocked to see Michael standing outside instead.
“If you kill it, will Asher get better?” he demanded.
Dean rubbed his fingers over his mouth. “Honestly? We don’t know.”
“You would have done this for your little brother?”
Dean swallowed. “If I could’ve traded myself—I didn’t have the chance. But yeah, I would’ve done anything for him.”
Michael stood a little straighter. “Me too. I’m in.”
****
John Winchester’s plan had depended on waiting for Dean’s outcry. Sam and Dean had a night-vision camera, so they wouldn’t need to rely on Michael’s sense of timing. Dean promised him a thousand times that they’d be one room over, just the thickness of a wall away, waiting with their guns. Dean talked him through what would happen: rolling off the bed and crawling under it, staying down to avoid any chance of being shot, preparing for the noise of the guns. In his careful instructions, Sam recognized the man who’d taught him how to hunt, and began to think that Dean was going to make it through this.
When the shtriga came, it was worse than Sam had imagined: a hooded figure of pure shadow, corpse-bony. It hovered over Michael, breathing in, and its mouth filled with light, like something spilling in from another, more horrible dimension.
They burst in, firing, and the shtriga flew backwards with the force of the bullets. Michael was nowhere to be seen—Sam trusted that he was under the bed—and they stalked quickly to where the shtriga was lying on the floor. Sam knelt, using his gun to prod at the thing’s all-concealing robe.
Sam didn’t even see it rise up, it was that fast. It knocked him back into a chest of drawers, his lower back hitting so hard that he felt something snap. Then it shoved Dean, sending him flying backwards across the room until he smacked into the opposite wall, smashing a picture in its frame before crashing to the floor. The shtriga was right behind him, wrapping its blackened twiglike fingers around Dean’s neck as it opened its mouth again.
It planned to finish what it had started years ago, Sam realized. Dean’s outstretched hand flailed for his gun as his face started to gray out in the unnatural white glow.
A noise of pure rage came from Sam’s mouth. He reached out with his mind, twisting the shtriga’s head away from Dean, and shot it between the eyes.
“Are you all right?” he demanded. Dean panted and, once he’d retrieved his gun, gave Sam a thumbs-up with his free hand. Sam limped over, helping Dean to his feet, and then as one they each pumped three more iron rounds into it.
Like that, it collapsed into nothingness, leaving only its black robes.
“Holy shit!” Michael said from behind them. “Just like Star Wars!”
They both turned to look at the boy, Dean’s raised eyebrow probably a match to Sam’s expression.
“I told you to stay under the bed,” Dean said, but there was no heat in it. Michael came closer, and Dean put a hand on his shoulder as he stared down at the fabric, finally daring to stick out his foot to brush against it.
He nodded, then. “Can we call the hospital and ask them to check on Asher?”
Dean smiled down at him and ruffled his hair. Michael didn’t even try to get away.
****
“You think the kid’s going to be all right, now that he knows what’s out there?” Sam asked as Dean stuck his arm out the window, waving goodbye.
Dean checked the rear-view mirror. “Dunno. Look how well-adjusted we are.” He chewed on the side of his mouth for a minute. “Anyway, he knows he’s a hero. That’s gotta be good for him, right?”
“You know there was nothing you could have done to save your brother, right?” Dean didn’t even twitch; it was as if Sam hadn’t spoken. “Dean, even your father’s spent twenty years looking for a weapon against the demon that killed him and your mom.” At that, Dean’s eyes widened a little; maybe it was just that Sam had offered no hint of disrespect for John Winchester. “What you do—what we do—it’s the right thing, but it’s not because you need to make up for anything.”
In the silence that followed, Sam had plenty of opportunity to think about his own ledger.
Fifteen minutes later, Dean spoke. “That’s not what it feels like.”
****
That night, Dean found them a motel in Michigan decorated entirely in shades of burnt orange and red-brown. Velveteen bedcovers patterned in paisley; beads for room dividers; stained-glass wall sconces. Even the bumpy floral-shaped anti-slip decals on the bottom of the tub (which itself was the color of badly curdled milk) were red and brown. “It’s like the seventies threw up in here,” Sam said, amazed, as he investigated.
Dean chuckled, and Sam heard the bed creak as he threw himself down. When Sam emerged from the bathroom, Dean was stretched out on top of the covers. He still had his boots on, his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands loose on top of his stomach as he stared up at the stuccoed ceiling.
“I never asked,” Dean said as Sam headed towards his bag, “but you don’t have any brothers or sisters, do you?”
Sam froze. He hadn’t lied to Dean about his past in months, largely because he hadn’t said anything at all. “I was—actually it was kind of screwed up,” he said. “My dad, he—he took in a bunch of other kids. But they were never—I kinda hated them.”
Dean made a vague humphing noise. When Sam dared to look, he was still facing up towards the ceiling. “I always wondered,” Dean said eventually, “what it would have been like. Growin’ up with a little brother. When Sammy came home from the hospital, I threw a fit, told my mom to take him back. But three days later, Dad says, I was his biggest fan.”
He had to tell Dean about Father now. Confession was only going to get harder. He could say he’d fled, he’d decided he wanted to switch sides. It was true in all but chronology.
“Dean--” he began.
But Dean was rolling off the bed, standing, grabbing hungrily at him, his sweet hot mouth stopping the words that Sam didn’t want to say.
Part 7.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Back at their room, Dean opened the door and the first thing Sam saw was the outline of a man standing by the window.
Sam had his gun aimed at the center of the man’s torso before Dean got the light on.
“Dad?” Dean said, his voice full of fear and wonder.
The man turned, and even through the beard Sam saw it: the angry shadow of the man in Dean’s pictures, the same lines around his eyes as were starting to form around Dean’s. But John Winchester’s eyes were narrowed with intense suspicion.
Dean dropped his bag and crossed the room in seconds, stopping inches away from his father and hesitating until his father reached up to pull him into a hug. Dean pressed his cheek into John Winchester’s shoulder; Sam could see the muscles in his back working through his shirt as he squeezed.
“It was a trap, Dad, I’m sorry,” Dean said, the words blurred. Sam carefully put his bag down, then rested the gun on top of it.
“It’s all right. I thought it might’ve been. Who’s this?”
Dean pulled away, his hand still lingering on Winchester’s shoulder, and turned his body back towards Sam. “Dad, this is Sam Marshall. He’s a hunter. We’ve been working together for about nine months.”
Sam nodded in greeting, wishing that he still had the gun just to have something to do with his hands. Dean’s use of ‘hunter’ had sent a warm shiver through him.
“We need to talk,” Winchester said. Dean began to look around the room, then stopped. He took a few steps back from his father. The light was too bad to tell, but Sam would have bet just about anything that he’d turned bright red. They hadn’t exactly cleaned up before they left, and Winchester had to have been in here long enough to see, and probably smell, what had been going on.
But that wasn’t where Winchester was going, not exactly: “This is family business, Dean.” He glanced quickly at Sam, then returned his focus to his son. “Private.”
Sam prepared himself to leave and take a calming walk around the block. Dean would tell him later, and so he could afford to let the man get away with ordering his son around like—No, it was a mistake to compare him to Father. John Winchester’s words had no threats curling around them like smoke, only the simple assumption of obedience.
Then Dean opened up a whole new heading under the category of Dean Winchester Is Braver Than You: he closed the distance between them and grabbed Sam’s hand, squeezing hard. “No, sir,” Dean said.
John Winchester gaped at Dean’s hand with roughly the same expression Sam imagined he himself was wearing. Sure, it was relatively obvious that they weren’t exactly living the chaste life of the Odd Couple, but Dean was saying a lot more than that, at least in Winchester-speak.
Dean’s fingers were hot and his palm was sweaty, but his jaw was as set as if he were facing down a pissed-off ghost. The triumphant rush swelling Sam’s chest didn’t dissipate even when he realized that this might complicate their access to whatever John Winchester knew. He met Dean’s father’s eyes, trying not to add any more challenge than necessary, just wanting him to know that Dean was not alone.
At last, Winchester exhaled. His own hands came up, as if he were staring into the barrel of a gun. “All right, then.” His eyes were shining, the way Dean’s always did when he was in deep emotional territory.
“I saw an all-night diner a block over,” Sam offered.
****
The diner reminded Sam of Nighthawks, glaring yellow brightness that didn’t dispel the loneliness of a dark night, but maybe that was just Chicago.
They hadn’t spoken on the way over after Sam had pointed them in the proper direction. John Winchester nodded pleasantly at the waitress who seated them, then waited for her to retreat.
He cleared his throat and addressed Dean. “You’ve told him about the yellow-eyed demon?”
Sam twitched, wanting to say something like, ‘yes, he’s passed on all three sentences you’ve ever said to him about it,’ but Dean’s knee brushed up against his and he only nodded along with Dean.
“I’ve been tracking down leads. I’m close, very close, to finding a weapon that will enable me to kill it. Permanently. Not just exorcise.”
Sam was silenced by the shock, not for the same reasons that Dean was. If that was even close to true, the man would have almost incalculable power. And, more importantly, that weapon was their way out. It could—Sam could—save Dean.
He wanted to demand to hear all about it, but he bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, and sure enough Dean did the right thing: “What is it, Dad? The weapon.” Dean sounded cracked open with hope, like some worn-down rock that turned out to be full of crystals inside.
Winchester shook his head. “I can’t tell you. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dad—”
“No, son.”
Dean bowed his head. “Yessir,” he mumbled, then said something unintelligible and stood, which meant that Sam had to get out of the booth. Dean stumbled off towards the bathroom sign in the back of the diner, and they both watched him go.
Sam took a couple of deep breaths. He could whammy Winchester now; he was unlikely to get a better opportunity. But there was still the problem of finesse, and not only could Sam not risk a failure to extract all the relevant details, Dean was likely to get a little upset if his father turned into a zombie while he was pulling himself together in the bathroom.
Instead, he sat down and stared across the table.
“So,” John Winchester said, and the expression in his eyes had nothing to do with hunting demons and everything to do with a parent sizing up a suitor, which was so farcical that it almost made Sam’s stomach turn. “How long have you and Dean been together?” His tone was weirdly polite, and Dean had already reported on when they’d met, so he was clearly asking the more intimate question.
Sam shrugged, then schooled his expression into something more placating. “It was gradual,” he said. With nothing obvious to say, he shut his mouth. Let Winchester figure out how to keep the conversation from dying, if he cared about the guy his son was fucking.
“Dean isn’t very experienced,” Winchester began. It was so very tempting to correct him on that, but instead Sam merely curled his hands into fists under the table, using the pain of his nails cutting into his palms to ground himself. “I don’t—it’s not that you’re a—he’s always thrown himself into things. It makes him—easy to hurt.”
Dean clearly had gotten more than bone structure from his father. That incoherent little speech sounded like it had grated like a rasp on the way out. Well, good. “With all due respect, we both know who’s hurt Dean more.”
Winchester rocked back an inch or so. Sam realized that Winchester’s hands were also concealed under the table. He wondered whether there were two guns aimed at his crotch right now, or only one.
“I don’t know what Dean’s told you—” Winchester’s face was stiff underneath his beard, his eyes narrowed.
Sam shook his head. “About you? Not a damned word. Your son grew up strong and loyal and I guess that’s some sort of testimony about you. But you broke him apart like you were splitting logs when you left him. I’m looking out for Dean now.”
Sam couldn’t interpret all the shades of anger and grief running over Winchester’s face, settling down at last into a dull burn. “Fair enough,” Winchester said in an impressively even tone. “You planning on getting in the way of hunting down this demon? Might be dangerous.”
Was the implication supposed to be that Sam was selfishly interested in Dean’s safety, or just that Sam was a coward? Didn’t matter. “It’s not the killing that worries me. Sir.”
He sensed Dean coming within earshot then, and it was fortunate that Winchester spotted Dean at the same time and shut up.
The resumed meal was just about as uncomfortable as Sam could have imagined. After Dean started turning his head between the two of them every five seconds, looking like someone just nailed a kitten to his steering wheel, Sam sucked it up and did his best to emanate goodwill. Winchester eventually managed to do the same—Sam could tell that he was an excellent con man—and by the end Dean was happy enough to order an ice cream sundae. Observing Dean in dessert heaven was a temptation no man could have resisted, so Sam let his lips curl up just a little, knowing that Winchester was watching and drawing the appropriate conclusions. But hell, half the diner was staring at Dean.
****
Winchester abandoned Dean in order to protect him. Dean professed to understand and even agree. He nodded and sirred and stared out at nothing with wet eyes after Winchester had gone.
Sam understood why Dean might want to think that inflicting pain was a sign of paternal love. Hell, he’d felt the same way when Father had explained, all those times, about the true meaning of all his punishments.
Difference was, Sam had grown to see the relish in Father’s eyes.
No, Winchester didn’t seem to be enjoying his solo quest. But he still made Sam want to scream: So, fear for Dean makes you weak, and your genius solution to that is to keep yourself ignorant about all the danger he’s in? Some accident of fate gave you Dean, Dean, and all you can think about is people twenty years dead?
If Sam could have explained that Dean was already a specific target, maybe his father wouldn’t have fled. But if the man had been rational, then Sam wouldn’t have needed to regret his inability to explain, so it wasn’t Sam’s fault. Anyway, Sam wanted him gone; Dean had gotten over his abandonment before, and could again.
If Winchester did manage to get his hands on a weapon that could kill Father, he’d be very useful. And then, perhaps, his utility would end.
****
“I gotta say, I’m impressed by your initiative,” Dean said from the driver’s seat. “Hell Hound’s Lair dot com?”
Sam shifted restlessly in his seat. “What can I say, I feel like killing something.”
Dean chewed his lower lip between his teeth. Sam guessed that he’d just been a tad too honest. Their encounters with Arba and John Winchester had left him bloodthirsty, yes, and the local legend seemed intriguing enough. He wanted the simple satisfaction of getting rid of a spirit that preyed on innocents.
Which was probably why the Hell House turned out to be the fault of other innocents, children playing with spirit sigils they didn’t understand. Creating a tulpa out of the power of online belief. Not that Sam thought that Father would rule over a well-organized world of sunshine and puppies—not unless the puppies were staked out to die of thirst in the desert, anyway—but Jesus, people were stupid.
The tulpa nearly decapitated Dean with its newly-imagined ax before Sam was able to draw its attention. For reasons possibly known only to Tibetan mystics, the TK worked on the ax, but not on the tulpa itself, so Sam found himself up against the wall getting choked while Dean improvised with lighter fluid.
At least the tulpa didn’t have any better idea of its own vulnerabilities than they did. When Dean yelled and waved his makeshift flamethrower at it, it let Sam go long enough that they escaped before the flames engulfed the house.
“What do we do if the legend changes?” Sam wondered as they watched a section of the roof collapse.
“Come back, I guess.” Dean caught Sam’s dissatisfied expression. “Makes you think, how many of the things we hunt only exist because people believe in them?”
“People should believe in something else,” Sam muttered.
Dean slung his arm across Sam’s shoulders. “Ah, that’s just, you know, human nature. Thinkin’ there’s still mysteries in the world, or proof of life after death—a lot of people need that.”
The top story of the house fell in with a crump audible over the crackle of the flames. “I don’t get why that makes anybody feel better,” Sam admitted. “As far as I’ve seen, the afterlife sucks. Tormented ghosts and demons from Hell. Wouldn’t it be better, safer, if it all just ended? If you could just be done when it’s your time. People delude themselves, thinking they’ll be the lucky ones, the saved.”
Dean’s thumb stroked against his neck. “At least we know how to bring them some peace,” he offered. “When I go, I want to be salted and burned. You’re right--you go out, you should get a real end.”
Sam turned his head. The fire reflected in Dean’s eyes, brightening the green of his pupils to tiger-fierceness. “Not any time soon.” He turned so that he could cup Dean’s cheek in his hand, brushing his thumb across Dean’s lower lip. Dean’s mouth opened slightly under his touch.
“You know—” Dean began, lame protest, before Sam pulled him close and then pulled him down, right there in the grass, the heat from the fire warming them as the house groaned and spat and burned.
They had to run for the car, holding their jeans up one-handed, when the fire engines finally arrived.
The legend of Mordechai Murdoch disappeared from the internet. There were girls in Richardson, Texas who’d live through their would-be suitors’ attempts to scare them. Sam would never know them, or want to, and they’d never know him. But he’d saved them anyway.
****
“Coordinates, again?” Sam could practically taste his own venom that time.
Dean pounded the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “If you’re coming, don’t bitch about it, all right?”
“Of course I’m coming to…” he found the correct square on the map, “Fitchburg, Wisconsin. I just--”
“Did you ever think maybe he’s my father, and I get to decide whether he’s treatin’ me wrong?”
“No,” he said, which surprised a laugh out of Dean. The billboard that whipped by promised free wireless at the next exit. “Hey, let’s grab lunch, see what we can find out about this hunt, about which I am not bitching.”
Dean kept his slight smile, and Sam didn’t say anything to get rid of it, even when he threw his hands up in frustration at the total lack of reported trouble in Fitchburg.
When they actually arrived, it took several hours to see the problem: late afternoon, and the streets were empty of kids. Sam sweet-talked the woman overseeing her daughter on the swings, all alone, and found out that there had been a recent wave of sickness among the town children. Only five or six were in the hospital, but parents were worried, keeping the healthy ones isolated.
Dean didn’t have CDC badges for them, but Sam had learned enough now to know that nobody actually read what was written on the badges. At least now his Homeland Security ID had an actual picture of him. He talked their way past the duty nurse and interviewed the doctor in charge, Hydecker, while Dean went through the charts looking for anything suggestive of the supernatural.
The children’s immune systems had simply collapsed, one family at a time.
****
Sam used TK to get into the Tarnower house, showing off for Dean. “I coulda done that in ten seconds,” Dean grumped, but Sam could tell that he saw the potential.
On the outside of Bethany Tarnower’s window ledge, Sam found an elongated black handprint, like a shadow frozen in place. When he leaned closer, he smelled rot, and he thought that he saw a cluster of fly eggs at one of the junctions between the fingers. “I’m ruling out pneumonia,” he said. “What the hell leaves a handprint like that?”
Dean pushed past him, inspecting the ledge. “It’s a shtriga,” he said, as if his voice was coming from somewhere very far away. “He wants me to finish the job.”
“What the hell is a shtriga?” He’d thought Dean had been careful to tell him about everything huntable.
“It’s kind of like a witch. I think.” Now Dean sounded even worse, like he’d been gut-shot. His tentativeness was another red flag. Sam knew that he’d sort of promised not to complain about John Winchester’s decision to send them here, but really: this was getting fucked up fast.
“I’ve never heard of a shtriga,” he prompted. “It wasn’t in the journal.”
“We—he hunted one before, in Fort Douglas. I was, uh, maybe ten. It got away.”
Thus, ‘finish the job.’ Except that according to Dean, nothing evil that John Winchester found ever walked away from him. Now Sam seriously regretted snarking earlier, because Dean would—not unfairly—interpret almost anything he asked as an attack on Dean’s father. He settled on a gentle tone and a vague prompt. “What else do you remember?”
“Nothin’,” Dean said immediately. “I was a kid.”
A kid who’d been bullseying targets for years. A kid who’d dropped his first match into an open coffin at age eight, and at ten was already learning how to drive.
Sweet mother of fuck. The only thing for it was to work the job, as fast as possible, and do as much of the work as possible by himself.
“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.
****
The surly preadolescent working the counter at the motel quailed under Sam’s black look and gave them the key to the closest room. Once they were there, Dean busied himself with weapons maintenance, but he didn’t do it in his usual orderly fashion, instead pulling a chair up to the bed and laying all the guns out across the mattress, drifting from one piece to another as if he kept forgetting which one he wanted.
Sam hit the databases. The usual sources were nearly barren, but one reference took him deep into Eastern European folklore repositories. A shtriga, it developed, was an evil entity that fed off of life force, preferably youthful life force. He got to the end of the article he’d found and stared at the screen. “Dean,” he said. “It says here shtrigas are invulnerable to ‘all weapons devised by God and man.’”
Dean’s head snapped up. “That’s not right,” he said. Sam swallowed down his instinctive desire to demand more. After a moment, Dean put his pistol down on the bedspread. “She’s vulnerable when she feeds. Catch her when she’s eating, you can blast her with consecrated iron. I think.”
‘Do you know how strange you’re acting?’ was what he wanted to ask. “How do you know that?” was what he did ask.
Dean picked at a thread that had come loose on the bedspread. “Dad told me.”
****
After that, their room seemed to have no air. They both slept badly, slamming into each other every time one of them shifted or turned.
In the morning, they were on their way to breakfast when they saw the motel kid again, all his attitude lost in dejection as he sat outside the motel office. Dean, of course, stopped to talk to him and found out that his little brother (whom Sam had never seen, but Dean apparently had) was the newest kid to be hospitalized for pneumonia.
“It’s my fault,” the older brother—Michael—said miserably.
“How?” Dean asked.
Michael raised his head, caught perhaps by the fact that Dean didn’t immediately dismiss his confession as the self-centeredness of a child. “I should’ve made sure the window was latched.”
Dean leaned closer, bracing his hands on his knees; he would’ve gotten on his knees, Sam was sure, if the kid had been a couple of years younger. “Listen, I can promise you this is not your fault. Okay?”
“It’s my job to look out for him,” Michael said, like his guts were hanging out. Dean nodded like he understood.
Michael’s mother came out then, and Dean managed to talk his way into giving her a ride to the hospital. She insisted they take her car, and Dean didn’t even balk at driving an automatic; he was deep in the need to hunt. Before he left, he grabbed Sam and leaned in close. “I want this thing dead.” Sam couldn’t say a word.
****
Sam drove the relatively short distance to the library at U Wisconsin-Madison. It didn’t take him long to find the record of deaths in Fort Douglas. Before that, there were other towns, roughly every fifteen to twenty years. The damage had only started to be glimpsed in Fitchburg. In the past, dozens of children had died, slowly, before the shtriga was finished.
Dean called in the afternoon, when his stomach was protesting that lunchtime was already hours past. He gave Dean a quick rundown.
“How far back does this thing go?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “I’ve tracked it back to Black River Falls, back in the 1890s. Real horror show.” He scrolled the microfilm, trying to find the date of the first reports, and stopped at a faded picture of doctors crowded around a patient’s bed. “Fuck me,” he said.
“Sam!”
“I got a photo here of Hydecker attending a sick kid.”
“Yeah?”
“From 1893.”
“Son of a—” Dean cut himself off, drawing an enraged breath.
“You still at the hospital?”
“Lookin’ at him,” Dean said, every word black with fury.
“Don’t do anything,” Sam said, knowing that if he needed to say it then a warning was useless. “I’ll be right there.”
****
Dean didn’t attack Hydecker at the hospital, though. He just brought Michael’s mother back to the motel, and was sitting in their room when Sam returned.
Sam went to him, pulling him up for better inspection, and checked to see that he wasn’t injured, even though that was stupid; Dean would have been arrested if he’d tried anything at the hospital. “You didn’t—”
Dean was too mad at the shtriga to react much to Sam’s manhandling. “I’m not gonna shoot up a pediatrics ward. And I wasn’t armed, so I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to. Anyway, wouldn’t’ve done any good—that bastard’s bulletproof until it opens its goddamned mouth to eat.”
“Okay, what now?”
Dean pulled away, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “The shtriga works through siblings. Means Michael’s next. We gotta talk to him, get his help.”
“You want to use a kid as bait?” It was a good idea, it just wasn’t a Dean idea.
“We’ve got to catch it somehow, or more kids are gonna die.” A muscle jumped in Dean’s jaw. “We let this thing go, it’s gonna keep killing. Now and every time it gets hungry. Over a hundred years already.” It had the sound of a rehearsed justification.
“Are you sure?” Sam would have sworn that Dean would do just about anything to think up an alternative—curl up under the covers of the kid’s bed and impersonate him, at least. As he thought about it, that plan was obviously insufficient: a creature like the shtriga could sense life force and that wouldn’t work.
“Dad sent me here to fix my mistake.”
Oh, this day just kept improving. “What are you talking about?” Sam demanded.
Dean turned his back to Sam, his arms pulled in tight to his sides. “I’m the one whose fault it is. All those kids, they’re hurt ‘cause of me.”
“What? Dean. Dean! You’ve been messed up since we got here. Talk to me,” he begged, closing the distance between them and sliding his hand down Dean’s back. Dean twitched and Sam backed off a few inches.
“He needed me for the hunt,” Dean said at last, his voice back to a kid’s wavering tones. The words spilled from him like water, fast and colorless. “He needed me to draw it out. I was supposed to wait until it started feeding. I swore to him I was strong enough. But I just—I got scared. I couldn’t let it--I called him too soon and when he fired, it—it ran, and I was cryin’, so he went to me instead of following it. He took me out of Fort Douglas, to a friend’s house. By the time he got back, the shtriga disappeared. Just gone. Gone until now.
“He never talked about it. But I let him down and he knew it. He told me what I had to do and I fucked it up. And now those kids are gonna die, unless Michael steps up to do what I couldn’t.”
“Dean,” Sam began.
“Don’t.”
****
But just because Dean’s mind was made up didn’t do squat to convince Michael.
When they went to find Michael in the motel office, he was, to put it mildly, unwilling to listen.
Dean’s insistence that pneumonia was not the culprit in Asher’s coma freaked Michael out from word one; anybody could have heard that Dean was about ready to break down.
Quickly enough, Michael stood and backed to the door, ready to flee. “You’re crazy! Just go away, or I’m calling the cops.”
“I had a brother,” Dean said, his voice harsh and deformed under the pressure, and Michael froze with one hand out towards the counter phone. “I would’ve done anything, anything to keep him safe. But I failed.” Dean sucked in air, ragged. Michael swayed fractionally towards him, drawn as anyone would be to Dean’s total vulnerability, his commitment. “Listen to me, Michael. This thing came through your window, and it attacked your brother. I’ve seen it. I know what it looks like.”
Michael closed his eyes. “It…it has this long, black robe?
“You saw it, didn’t you?” Dean asked, his voice gentling like a storm’s sudden ending.
“I thought it was a nightmare.”
Dean breathed out through his nose. “I wish—I wish to hell I didn’t have to tell you this. But sometimes, nightmares are real.”
“Why are you telling me?” Michael was visibly a kid now. Wanting someone else to take care of the problem—his mom, still at the hospital; maybe his missing father. Sam felt a strange urge to reach out and give him a hug.
That wasn’t what they had to give him. “We need your help,” Dean admitted.
And then it fell apart. Michael was having none of it, still terrified of what he’d seen. He didn’t listen when Dean tried to use his anger over his brother’s illness, then warned him that other kids were still in danger.
Sam had to pull him away when he saw that Dean was about fifteen seconds from taking out his own guilt on the kid. Sam had nothing against emotional blackmail in theory, but it was plain that neither Dean nor Michael would benefit from further conversation.
****
“Well, that sucked,” Dean said when Sam had hustled him back to their room.
“You can’t expect a kid to just do something like that,” Sam told him, not meaning Michael.
Dean ignored him. “Now what?”
“Maybe we can figure out some way to fake a tasty life force,” Sam said, without much conviction. They didn’t even know what the shtriga sensed, not well enough to simulate it.
Someone rapped on the door. Sam’s shoulders sagged involuntarily; it was probably Michael’s mother, come to tell them to get the hell away from her remaining kid.
He was shocked to see Michael standing outside instead.
“If you kill it, will Asher get better?” he demanded.
Dean rubbed his fingers over his mouth. “Honestly? We don’t know.”
“You would have done this for your little brother?”
Dean swallowed. “If I could’ve traded myself—I didn’t have the chance. But yeah, I would’ve done anything for him.”
Michael stood a little straighter. “Me too. I’m in.”
****
John Winchester’s plan had depended on waiting for Dean’s outcry. Sam and Dean had a night-vision camera, so they wouldn’t need to rely on Michael’s sense of timing. Dean promised him a thousand times that they’d be one room over, just the thickness of a wall away, waiting with their guns. Dean talked him through what would happen: rolling off the bed and crawling under it, staying down to avoid any chance of being shot, preparing for the noise of the guns. In his careful instructions, Sam recognized the man who’d taught him how to hunt, and began to think that Dean was going to make it through this.
When the shtriga came, it was worse than Sam had imagined: a hooded figure of pure shadow, corpse-bony. It hovered over Michael, breathing in, and its mouth filled with light, like something spilling in from another, more horrible dimension.
They burst in, firing, and the shtriga flew backwards with the force of the bullets. Michael was nowhere to be seen—Sam trusted that he was under the bed—and they stalked quickly to where the shtriga was lying on the floor. Sam knelt, using his gun to prod at the thing’s all-concealing robe.
Sam didn’t even see it rise up, it was that fast. It knocked him back into a chest of drawers, his lower back hitting so hard that he felt something snap. Then it shoved Dean, sending him flying backwards across the room until he smacked into the opposite wall, smashing a picture in its frame before crashing to the floor. The shtriga was right behind him, wrapping its blackened twiglike fingers around Dean’s neck as it opened its mouth again.
It planned to finish what it had started years ago, Sam realized. Dean’s outstretched hand flailed for his gun as his face started to gray out in the unnatural white glow.
A noise of pure rage came from Sam’s mouth. He reached out with his mind, twisting the shtriga’s head away from Dean, and shot it between the eyes.
“Are you all right?” he demanded. Dean panted and, once he’d retrieved his gun, gave Sam a thumbs-up with his free hand. Sam limped over, helping Dean to his feet, and then as one they each pumped three more iron rounds into it.
Like that, it collapsed into nothingness, leaving only its black robes.
“Holy shit!” Michael said from behind them. “Just like Star Wars!”
They both turned to look at the boy, Dean’s raised eyebrow probably a match to Sam’s expression.
“I told you to stay under the bed,” Dean said, but there was no heat in it. Michael came closer, and Dean put a hand on his shoulder as he stared down at the fabric, finally daring to stick out his foot to brush against it.
He nodded, then. “Can we call the hospital and ask them to check on Asher?”
Dean smiled down at him and ruffled his hair. Michael didn’t even try to get away.
****
“You think the kid’s going to be all right, now that he knows what’s out there?” Sam asked as Dean stuck his arm out the window, waving goodbye.
Dean checked the rear-view mirror. “Dunno. Look how well-adjusted we are.” He chewed on the side of his mouth for a minute. “Anyway, he knows he’s a hero. That’s gotta be good for him, right?”
“You know there was nothing you could have done to save your brother, right?” Dean didn’t even twitch; it was as if Sam hadn’t spoken. “Dean, even your father’s spent twenty years looking for a weapon against the demon that killed him and your mom.” At that, Dean’s eyes widened a little; maybe it was just that Sam had offered no hint of disrespect for John Winchester. “What you do—what we do—it’s the right thing, but it’s not because you need to make up for anything.”
In the silence that followed, Sam had plenty of opportunity to think about his own ledger.
Fifteen minutes later, Dean spoke. “That’s not what it feels like.”
****
That night, Dean found them a motel in Michigan decorated entirely in shades of burnt orange and red-brown. Velveteen bedcovers patterned in paisley; beads for room dividers; stained-glass wall sconces. Even the bumpy floral-shaped anti-slip decals on the bottom of the tub (which itself was the color of badly curdled milk) were red and brown. “It’s like the seventies threw up in here,” Sam said, amazed, as he investigated.
Dean chuckled, and Sam heard the bed creak as he threw himself down. When Sam emerged from the bathroom, Dean was stretched out on top of the covers. He still had his boots on, his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands loose on top of his stomach as he stared up at the stuccoed ceiling.
“I never asked,” Dean said as Sam headed towards his bag, “but you don’t have any brothers or sisters, do you?”
Sam froze. He hadn’t lied to Dean about his past in months, largely because he hadn’t said anything at all. “I was—actually it was kind of screwed up,” he said. “My dad, he—he took in a bunch of other kids. But they were never—I kinda hated them.”
Dean made a vague humphing noise. When Sam dared to look, he was still facing up towards the ceiling. “I always wondered,” Dean said eventually, “what it would have been like. Growin’ up with a little brother. When Sammy came home from the hospital, I threw a fit, told my mom to take him back. But three days later, Dad says, I was his biggest fan.”
He had to tell Dean about Father now. Confession was only going to get harder. He could say he’d fled, he’d decided he wanted to switch sides. It was true in all but chronology.
“Dean--” he began.
But Dean was rolling off the bed, standing, grabbing hungrily at him, his sweet hot mouth stopping the words that Sam didn’t want to say.
Part 7.
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I was on the edge of my seat for and loved the precision and fury of Sam and John's conversation in the diner. This version of the attack of the shtriga was skewed in all the right ways. Loved Sam's reaction to that too.
Goodness is creeping up on Sam like the changing of a tide; he's not really noticing it happen, but it's happening. Lovely.
The tension as we get closer to the end is just unbearable. *chews nails*
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How did you do this? It's too perfect to be real.
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However, this was delicious, as always.
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It didn't appear to make Sam too happy, finding out that Dean can make hard choices if he has to. Also seems a little selflessness is starting to creep under Sam's skin.
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The shtriga played out well with the differences too. And on a random side note, can i just say that I love the way you have Sam do research (databases, libraries, microfiche! not just Googling up random stuff)? /research geek
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I am also a research geek. Google's a good place to start on a lot of things, but proprietary databases and microfiche will let you go a lot deeper, and Sam's smart enough to know that even if the show isn't.
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awesome...more?
:)
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Love it.
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Wow. See, just when I'm completely overcome by the woobie-ness, and there are the little reminders that Sam really doesn't see things like a normal person would.
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I just wanted to say that this fic has me on the edge of my seat. I'm even refreshing your LJ multiple times a day *just in case* you decide to maybe post two parts in one day, even though I know better. I can't wait to finish it, and I've been reccing it to all my friends who read SPN already, and I never rec WIPs. So yeah, it's that good. Thank you for writing it!
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And why do I get the feeling that this was the only opportunity Sam was going to get to tell Dean the truth about his father??? But then, if Dean came at me wanting sex, I'd probably forget everything in my brain too :)
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You have good instincts about Sam's opportunity to confess. And I agree, Dean would be pretty distracting to anyone not actually bleeding to death at the moment.
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Excellent twist on the striga. And i loved Sam meeting John and instantly just being *pissed*.
And Dean being brave, and...just...everything.
:)
*loves*
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